Remembering My Grandmother, Olga Sell

My mother's mother was born on April 18, 1895, in Fedorovka, Ukraine - about 64 miles north-west of Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. On February 15, 1914, at the age of 19, she married my mother's father, Theodor Guhl. Unfortunately, he died of typhus a few years later (at the age of 31), leaving her with three young children and a farm to manage. Eventually one of her late husband's relatives came to her aid - and eventually became her second husband!

On November 23, 1923, she married Hugo Bartz, her late husband's cousin. They went on to have eight more children, the first born in the Ukraine - the rest, in Canada.

Here is a picture of the family taken in the 1940's in Alberta.

Why did they immigrate to Canada?

After the Russian Revolution, in 1918, all the farmland in the Ukraine and in Russia was being taken over by Stalin, the Russian dictator. Realizing that they were about to lose everything, and risked being sent to forced labor camps in Siberia, my mother's parents, like many in their predicament, applied to immigrate to Canada. They arrived in December, 1928, a few weeks before Stalin's government closed the doors on immigration. They were lucky to have escaped. This family photo shows them in the late 1930's.

They lived in Edmonton for many years, but eventually my grandfather decided to move to a warmer place for health reasons. They relocated to Kelowna, BC, in 1955, where my grandfather opened a window and door business. Soon their second-youngest son, Ron, joined them.

Their house was next door to the carpentry shop.

This photo shows them at the 1960 wedding of Ron to Evelyn in Kelowna.

My grandmother died several years later, on November 26, 1966, in Kelowna, after having several strokes. She was 71 years old when she died.